Hospital marketing is competitive. Only in rural areas do you have only one hospital provider, and even those systems have to compete with private practice. So, in all markets, hospital marketing is essential – and yet it can be difficult to differentiate.

By understanding the latest trends, you can outperform your competition that may not be following those same trends. There is a lot going on in the marketing industry now that is exciting and effective – and your hospital needs to take notice.

Live Video Is Becoming King

Video has long been a major player in marketing. Video creates more engagement than any other format and creates positive associations between a brand and viewers.

The latest trend in video comes in the form of live, real-time, streaming video. Whether you see it on Facebook, YouTube, or an individual website, live video is dominating because it generates a lot of engagement.

Hospitals can take advantage by streaming health-related content, which is enormously popular. Just look at the fact that WebMD is the 129th most popular website in the country. Video can be better at communicating information because it naturally captivates people and catches – and holds – their interest better than text alone.

Consider the health experts you have at your disposal. Find personable, relatable, camera-friendly personnel to go live and present the latest findings and tips in medicine to help your target audience.

Telemedicine Is Becoming More Popular

For years, hospitals shrank away from telemedicine because it was expensive and limited. Now, those barriers have fallen away, and telemedicine has become more accessible to hospitals – and more in demand from patients.

If you can create a telemedicine service, that gives you a huge advantage from a marketing standpoint. There is also a natural synergy between telemedicine and digital marketing. People who are prospects for one are natural users of the other. Put another way, if someone can be reached effectively through Facebook, Instagram, or mobile search, they are more likely to enjoy the benefits of telemedicine.

We encourage you to at least consider and evaluate telemedicine as a service option, not just for better patient satisfaction, but for more effective marketing options.

Location-Based Marketing Is More Important than Ever Before

Hospitals depend on geography for their patients. Patients tend to go to the closest hospital. That is not just dependent upon where they live, but where they are at that moment.

Location-based marketing, through geofencing, can deliver the right message at the right time to the right place. If someone is in a particular area, you can target them with your message and ads through their mobile device while they are on the move. You can also target them through other methods if they are in a home or office within your service area.

You can even target specific neighborhoods if you want to increase the number of patients you see from that neighborhood. A rigorous analytics approach at your hospital can tell you where your patients live – and where they don’t live. The same goes for where they work. You can then use geofencing to market accordingly.

What are some ways you can use these trends in a creative manner to get better results?

TotalCom is a full-service hospital marketing and advertising agency that believes in getting great results from telling great stories. Contact us for more information and see what stories we can tell for you.

You took the plunge about the iPhone X and you’re not even sure if you’re supposed to say iPhone X or iPhone ten.

But what’s the big difference between this model and the one you had before collecting a new monthly payment added to your stack of bills?

Facial recognition is the big difference. Are you unlocking your phone or is it unlocking you? This could bring in a new era for marketers. Since the announcement of the iPhone X, facial recognition has quickly become the topic of dinner conversations everywhere. Facial recognition used to be reserved for top secret labs or something you saw the President use in a movie. But now we have access to it as well (celebrities, they’re just like us!)

While this feature is marketed as a security function for unlocking your phone, a consumer device used by the masses is a seriously powerful technology.

It is said 90% of personal communications is nonverbal. Every day there are instances where we don’t understand the nonverbal cues of the person on the other end of our screens. We use emojis and GIFs to try and share emotion within our digital interactions.

For all of us in the communications business, we know good experiences lead to trust and loyalty while bad experiences lead to brand rejection. So what could we do as marketers if we were able to obtain real-time reactions from a consumers? Imagine a world where we have access to consumer’s facial expressions and emotional cues in reaction to products and brands?

If we could access the facial cues from patients waiting for an extended time in the emergency room? The excitement on someone’s face when they try out a restaurant’s new dish. Or the skepticism on your face when you’re indulging in a purchase you shouldn’t be.

Currently, Apple is keeping detailed facial recognition data local on the phone and not storing it on its servers. App makers can use the iPhone X, with the user’s permission, to read a rough map of a stream of facial expressions. While Apple may never store this information for public use, it’s interesting to think about a world where we design advertisements based on the most unique human feature. This technology would tell us more about our consumers than we’ve ever known before.

These days, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms are changing the way patients interact with their healthcare providers. Social media is certainly something that you can’t afford to ignore.

Paid social is having a banner year in 2017. Analysts from HootSuite predicted that social ad spending will top $35 billion this year. Judging by the past several years, which have each seen consistent growth, that growth will continue into the future.

As long as you do it right – paid social is an excellent investment in your healthcare marketing plan. Here are 3 reasons why.

Paid social is a necessity if you want your brand to be seen on social media.

When you post something on social media, you’re competing with what feels like 1,999,999 other healthcare businesses- and we’re just talking about ones that are advertising. Realistically, there’s no way that your posts are going to get engagement from more than a few people unless you pay to promote them. With social media algorithms becoming more and more complicated, it makes it even harder for current and potential patients to see your content.

Organic social is still important, but if you want your posts to be seen, it’s time to set aside some budget for paid social ads.

Paid social allows you to target users with incredible specificity.

It’s really amazing how specific you can get with your ad targeting these days.

Look at Facebook, for example. You can customize your audience by everything from level of education and field of study, to online activities, to simple demographics.

This ultra-targeting means that you’re a lot less likely to be wasting your ad dollars. Instead of showing your ad to people who almost certainly aren’t going to buy what you’re selling anyway – men and gynecologists, for example. Through targeting, you won’t be annoying people with ads they would never be interested in and you’re cultivating an audience that may eventually lead to a loyal customer.

It’s highly resource- and cost-effective.

When you’re just starting out with paid social advertising, you don’t have to know it all. You can create relatively basic ads with a relatively basic audience and budget. You also don’t need a huge budget to begin with. Base your budget on factors including your company size, the number of people you want to see your ad, etc… This is especially helpful when your hospital is just starting out and not sure where to begin.

The key is to be patient and be proactive. Watch your analytics, stick to your goals, and don’t be afraid to experiment when needed.

Social media can be hard to navigate, to improve your chances of succeeding, allow TotalCom to help you.

Beat the Healthcare PPC Wormhole

Digital marketing in the healthcare industry is crucial in a time where 1 out of every 20 google searches are health related, but running a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is challenging. Without advanced techniques, health care companies will waste their money on ad space by failing to get seen.

Digital marketing for hospitals is specifically challenging. Below we have outlined exactly why your hospital may be struggling in the PPC department, and listed a number of tactics to help you beat the PPC healthcare wormhole.

Competition: Because of the above retargeting restrictions, staying visible on search engine result pages (SERPs) is incredibly important, but keywords are highly competitive (and expensive).

Knowledge Graphs: In an effort to provide more correct medical information, and panicked patients, google has implemented knowledge graphs (certified medical information) that takes over the right hand side of SERPs.

All of that considered, there must be a way to effectively use digital marketing for hospitals with PPC.

Contact Information

Is your contact information readily available for other businesses and patients to view? Check, check, and check again! This is critical for your PPC plan. A patient searching for hospital care digitally is most likely in need of services sooner than later. Having your contact information positioned clearly can set you apart from competitors. Be sure to set up call extensions, location extensions and sitelink extensions to your ad. This makes for a larger ad, and is known to contribute to higher rankings on SERPs.

Contact information is the number one way to gain conversions, so place it on every landing page. If it’s hard to find your phone number, and easy to find a competitors, you will most likely lose a potential patient.

Mobile Marketing

Going mobile is imperative. If contact information is a key factor for a PPC strategy, so is going mobile. Contact information involves communication, and if you need fast contact, you have to call. Using your phone to find and contact a hospital makes it simpler. If your hospital is mobile, a potential patient simply needs to click the number that pops up on the Google page to call you.

Be sure you are tracking your Adwords performance by specific devices. Pay close attention to what mobile campaigns are and are not working. Make your bid adjustments accordingly.

Know Yourself

Finally, understand your target audience. Determine what your patients are searching for the most. There are many types of patients to consider for a hospital. Are your patients generally looking for urgent, emergency care? Are they searching hospital options knowing they will be in for a long term stay? Do your patients even know what they are looking for at all?

Step into the patient’s shoes and consider what you would search for if you were them. Think of triggers that grab their attention that you can then incorporate into the text of your PPC ads. Knowing what sets you apart from your competitors helps you create a PPC campaign that stands out

Interested in learning more about using PPC for your hospital’s digital marketing strategies? We specialize in using dedicated PPC campaigns to boost results for hospitals looking to gain an edge in the paid digital space. Contact us today.

Consumers have become very savvy and bold in their use of social media to express anger and dissatisfaction against corporations and organizations.

Many hospitals are reluctant to become active in social media. Some have no presence at all and others have very limited engagement. Some are reluctant due to compliance issues and others are just afraid of the potential for negative comments. Why provide a venue for negative comments is the argument? And the hesitations are understandable.

BUT, the lack of engagement in social media by a hospital doesn’t mean the conversations aren’t happening. Our reluctance doesn’t stop the conversations. And even more alarming, consumers are becoming more strident and sophisticated in their use of social media to express anger and dissatisfaction.

Here are just a couple of examples. A college student in Washington D.C. used a petition on Change.org to try to pressure Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts to reverse it’s denial of rehabilitation coverage for his father. A mother launched a social media campaign against Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia after it denied a transplant to her child because, as the mother contended, her child was developmentally disabled. Both organizations I’m sure based their decision upon existing standards, policies and practices. But that didn’t stop the individuals from initiating a social media campaign and engaging many others in their effort to damage the brand’s reputation. These individuals were acting emotionally out of anger and outrage, and maybe hopelessness. Many consumers have found that traditional appeals do not get the results desired and so they turn to social media guerrilla tactics. They hope they can create enough pressure to get their desired result and if not, they will damage the brand.

Now the big question for all hospital marketers: is there a campaign being conducted against your hospital right now, that you are not aware of? Are disgruntled patients (rightly or wrongly) fanning the flame, attacking your brand and soliciting others to do the same? If you ignore social media, don’t want to have anything to do with it, or take it lightly, it could be happening.

Every hospital should have means to monitor social network activity about their brand. Every hospital should have a social media presence so that if negative things are being said the hospital can join the conversation and attempt to talk the offended party offline to address the issues. And every hospital should be engaged in social networks to demonstrate the hospital’s concern and responsiveness to concerns and complaints.

Hospitals should engage authentically in social media networks and be part of the human discussion rather than being perceived as unengaged and detached. Remember, there could be conversations going on right now about your brand that you need to be aware of. And in which you should be participating.

This blog was provided by Brittany Richards who is an editorial coordinator at Software Advice <http://www.softwareadvice.com/> where she handles the Profitable Practice blog.

Five steps to improve the effectiveness of your hospital’s newsletter.

Email newsletters are a common way to keep your hospital top-of-mind for potential patients, as well effectively reinforcing yourself as a credible healthcare authority within your market. Companies such as Constant Contact provide an affordable, valuable service to organizations that wish to develop a newsletter following and attract new patients. However, effective newsletter marketing is an art, and it requires continuous attention and effort to maintain a following.

Steve Klinghoffer of WPI Communications advises healthcare professionals to follow these six tips to ensure their email marketing programs are effective:

Know Your BrandThere should be consistency across all marketing materials. Make sure font and color schemes match. What you send out is a reflection of your hospital so always remember to use the newsletter to reaffirm your brand.

Build a Quality Email ListPut the email “subscribe” button on your website and social media channels. People who visit these pages are more likely to be interested in receiving a newsletter. This can also ensure that the contacts on the list know what they’re are signing up for. You don’t ever want your emails to come across as spam. Ever. Ask patients to sign-up and keep the process short and sweet.

Develop Interesting, Relevant Content
It is no mystery that many emails go unopened or unread. But there is a remedy for this. Use high-quality content to engage your reader. For instance, your hospital could consider email newsletter content on the impact of sugary drinks on a child’s health. It’s a relatable topic and can apply to many different readers. Just remember: The goal is to educate, not sell. If done correctly, the newsletter can provide valuable and helpful content and build loyalty.

Write a Good Subject LineThe subject line is the bait. It is the first thing a reader sees so it should be concise and targeted. Consider something like “Can french fries cause health problems?” versus “Hospital X eNewsletter.”

Be ConsistentFind which email frequency works best for your hospital and stick to it. If you send out an email monthly then keep it monthly. Just make sure your efforts are consistent. If your content is compelling enough, your readers will anticipate your email. Until you get there, find which email frequency works best for you. Steve Klinghoffer, President of WPI Communications, suggests monthly emails for patient audiences and quarterly for health care providers.

Measure Your ROIThe money put toward an email campaign should generate a return. There are important metrics that can be measured to gain insight on the success of your email campaigns. Most email marketing providers track who opened the email, clicked links and did email forwards. Keep a record of that information because the metrics can help shape content for the future.

A couple of new patients could cover the costs of a newsletter for a full year. Maximize your results with good content, design and distribution.

This blog was provided by Brittany Richards who is an editorial coordinator at Software Advice <http://www.softwareadvice.com/> where she handles the Profitable Practice blog.

Many web ads bought through digital ad exchanges are appearing to no one and some are even appearing on sites with objectionable content.

Those digital ad exchanges appear to be a great deal. You provide the information concerning whom you want to reach and they’ll take your digital ad and place it across a wide range of websites that will deliver the audience you are seeking. You provide the ad and they do all the work.

But now research is indicating that your ads are not appearing where you might think or even want your ads to appear. Comscore conducted research to see where digital ads are actually appearing and the results were alarming. The research was conducted on behalf of twelve major brands including Ford and Kellogg. The results reported by Jeff Roberts in paidcontent.org indicated as much as 31% of the 1.8 billion ad impressions purchased by these companies were not seen at all. The ads were shown to non-humans – bots or spiders that induce a web page to display an ad.

In addition, 72% of all their ad campaigns resulted in brands having their ads placed next to questionable content. Sites dedicated to pornography, piracy or malware.

This is not to say all digital ad exchanges are bad. It’s just to point out there are risks involved in placing digital ads across multiple sites with ad exchanges. Unlike radio, TV or print advertising, with digital advertising it’s hard to know exactly where your online ad appears.

For healthcare marketers, it’s safer to stay with purchasing ads on high-traffic local sites, like the local newspaper or television websites. But even these local media companies are now partnering with ad exchanges to offer behavior-based buys across a wide range of websites. So we must be careful and understand as much as possible about where our ads will actually appear.

It’s all part of the development and evolution of digital advertising. There’s a lot of big numbers thrown out, even by reputable local digital sites. But sometimes it’s difficult to have great confidence in some of those numbers and in the way they are presented by ad reps. As the digital advertising industry develops, hopefully more precise and reliable results will be provided which will increase our level of confidence in online advertising. In the meantime, we must be as careful, and as thoughtful as possible, in evaluating digital advertising options to make sure our ads are actually being seen by human beings and within a context that’s appropriate and suitable for our healthcare messages.

Below is an article by Marty Reardon that appeared in MarketingProfs that gives very sound advice on how to improve both your SEO ranking and your website experience. There are ten very helpful pieces of advice that healthcare marketers can use to improve their hospital’s website.

10 SEO Tips to Improve Your Search Rankings–and Your Website

SEO, when done well—with quality in mind—doesn’t just help increase your search rankings; it also improves your entire website from the viewpoint of search engines as well as your visitors. And that, rather than a cheap shot at fooling search engine algorithms, should be the ultimate aim of your SEO campaign.

So here are 10 tips that won’t just knock you up a few places in search results pages for a couple of months; rather, they’ll help turn a visit to your website into a better experience and help your site to naturally grow in popularity.

Tip 1: Create incredible content

The most important aspect of your website—and the most important part of all your optimization efforts—is your content. You can’t get around that fact in the long run, even with the best of SEO tricks. And why would you want to? You can fool the search bots for a while (and less and less with every passing year), but if your content is of low quality, nobody is going to visit your website or share with the world what you’re offering. Good content, on the other hand, will be eventually be widely read and widely shared by others, often on their own websites, creating excellent link-building opportunities for your website (see Tip No. 5).

Your site’s content must be well written, informative, as unique as possible, and free of excessive keyword use intended solely to garner search spider attention. If your content is genuinely informative and written for the niche it’s serving, it will already have the keywords you need.

Update your content frequently to focus on the latest information in you niche.

Tip 2: Pick a comfortable niche

Your blog or website can deal with extremely general subjects, but that will make your work a lot harder. General-interest websites have to deal with stiff competition from some very powerful and well established players.

Sticking to a niche, on the other hand, limits your audience but also limits your competition. You can write more authoritatively on your subject, and you can more easily generate a reputation for reliability among a much smaller but more loyal circle of readers.

The important thing is to research the keywords that are most searched for in your niche and use them wisely in your Web pages. You should also keep well abreast of new developments in the field.

Tip 3: Carefully research keywords

We’ve noted the danger of using too many keywords, but that does not mean you have to deliberately stop using them; on the contrary, keywords are still vital for SEO.

Compile a well-researched list of the most commonly searched for keywords and phrases in your niche by using tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool; once you’ve got them sorted out, scatter them strategically throughout your content, your headlines, and your sub-headers. Just make sure you don’t overdo it by using them to the point that text flow seems unnatural.

Tip 4: Stick to SEO-friendly URLs

You should also optimize all of your website’s pages at a basic level. Start by ensuring that every page of your website has a distinct and SEO-friendly URL that describes what the page is about in a few words. For example, if you have a page about cooking steak, instead of <www.myawesomesite.com/tips/item4?=45756>, convert your URL into something like <www.myawesomesite.com/tips/grilling-the-best-steak>. That is much more search engine friendly.

Tip 5: Use tags and meta descriptions

You should create concisely informative meta descriptions of all your Web pages with the keywords for that page appearing in the description; you’ll have 150-160 characters to fill. These meta descriptions are likely not use by Google any more for ranking, but they’re useful in attracting attention from human readers in the search results page, so use them anyway.

Also include title tags for every important page of your site. These need to fit within 70 characters and should offer very quick descriptions of the individual pages they represent with at least one or two page relevant keywords within them. Make these friendly to human readers, don’t just list keywords.

Tip 6: Don’t forget image attributes

You likely have content-relevant images on your website or blog; those images offer an excellent SEO boosting opportunity thanks to image search features on Google and other engines. However, search spiders can’t analyze images well if related text is not included—though they do consider the name of the image file (e.g., “cavalier-king-charles-puppy.jpg” is better than “sidebar-image.jpg”).

Therefore, you need to create brief HTML description tags for each image you post amid your website content. These tags should consist of a quick description of what the image is of or what it relates to in your content.

Tip 7: Build internal links

Internal link-building is an on-site SEO tactic that consists of creating a well-organized and thorough link structure among your own website’s pages. In other words, as many pages as possible should be connected to each other in a hierarchical or web-like connections of in-page, text-based hyperlinks.

Pay particular attention to creating connections between your main pages and your homepage; do so via menu objects or by placing the links right into your on-page content.

Another helpful internal link-building feature is a sitemap, which has the benefit of also helping search spiders index your site better and faster.

Tip 8: Build external links

External link building is a different animal: You need to encourage the creation of backlinks to your site from other websites; that is, links on other sites lead back to relevant content on your own website pages.

If you want to build external links successfully and without resorting to black hat tactics, you’re going to have to dedicate a lot of time to posting links to social sites, finding guest post opportunities that allow you to publish links back to your website, leaving plenty of informative guest comments on other websites in your niche, and syndicating your RSS feed (if you have one).

(Try to ensure that those links are not “nofollow.” Links with a nofollow attribute are ignored by search spiders as a valid backlink in the sense that your site doesn’t receive “credibility points” from the search engines. You can still get visitors as a result of those links, however, because people will click on them and end up on your site.)

The process of building backlinks is slow, but it eventually pays off to create some really good SEO.

Tip 9: Enable social media sharing

Enable as many social media sharing options on your website as you can. Install buttons for all the major social sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and others on every important page of your website. With these buttons, your readers can spread the word about the valuable and interesting content you have to offer; eventually that content can find its way to other websites and so lead to some quality backlinks.

Tip 10: Avoid using Flash and images as text

The search spiders that index websites read only text on websites and are, for the most part, incapable of analyzing Flash or image files. So, in general, stay away from both as content mediums. Do not use Flash-based site navigation tools and stay away from creating content text that is in image form.

In the case of Flash navigation, the search bot won’t be able to click through to index the pages the flash navigation links to, leaving parts of your website without indexing. In the case of image-based text, any useful information and keywords you put there will be invisible to the search engine.

Stick to site browsing code like jQuery or CSS and create purely text-based written content.

Research shows that consumers think the amount of information available to them from the plethora of choices is considered just right.

It’s truly the Age of Information. Information abounds everywhere, from so many sources and in so many formats. We’ve never been bombarded with as much information as we are today. And many have suggested the “always on” media environment has overwhelmed audiences and is creating antisocial social media addicts.

In addition to the almost unlimited amount of information available online, there are now an average of 72 hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube, over 340 million tweets per day on Twitter and over 50 million blogs on Tumblr. It would be easy to assume consumers are just overwhelmed by all the seemingly limitless amounts of information that is now available.

Bianca Bosker, writing for The Huffington Post cited research conducted by the University of Michigan from 7 focus groups to determine the consumer’s psyche and ability to adapt to the barrage of information that hits them each day.

Surprisingly, the study found the participants felt empowered and enthusiastic about the volume of information available at their fingertips, rather than overloaded. Only about 13% felt a sense of overload and that came most commonly from people who had elementary internet skills. . However the participants did not provide a strong endorsement for Facebook and Twitter stating the quality of information, not quantity on these sites could be a turnoff.

Published in the journal “The Information Society” the research indicated, rather than being overburdened, the participants enjoyed the range of information available online.

Here are some other findings from the study

Television is still the most popular media source followed by websites.

However they were frustrated with the sensationalism of TV

Many preferred getting news from online bloggers rather than news anchors

Over a quarter of the participants had some negative feelings about social media

Many are annoyed by what they consider as the minutia of people’s lives fed to them through Facebook and Twitter

For healthcare marketers, it’s good to know consumers want information. They are seeking information to make their lives better. If we provide information that’s useful and helpful and consumers will welcome it. In fact, they expect it. However we must be careful not to annoy them with information that’s considered trivial or self-serving.